


A Venn Diagram of All of Kim Jongin’s Exes (by Yours Truly, Lee Taemin)

by mihaeng



Category: SuperM (Korea Band)
Genre: Best Friends Kim Jongin | Kai & Lee Taemin, Canon Compliant, Fluff and Crack, Kim Jongin | Kai-centric, M/M, Past Jung Soojung | Krystal/Kim Jongin | Kai, Past Kim Jongin | Kai/Jennie Kim, Past Relationship(s), mentions of jongin's exes aka, the tiniest hint of angst if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:42:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26613904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mihaeng/pseuds/mihaeng
Summary: Jongin can’t sleep. So Taemin does the only logical solution to Jongin’s problem: make a Venn Diagram of all the common traits Jongin’s exes had to find his ultimate ideal type.
Relationships: Kim Jongin | Kai/Mark Lee (NCT)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 209





	A Venn Diagram of All of Kim Jongin’s Exes (by Yours Truly, Lee Taemin)

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the superm apologist GC that fed me SuperM propaganda and Eden that had pointed out how Mark fits Jongin's ideal type criteria via common thread found in between all of his (public) exes. 
> 
> I don’t know how the fuck this came together but I would like to apologize in advance because this is unbetaed. We live fearlessly like unapologetic spermies on twitter. Enjoy!

It’s never a good idea to stay up past midnight, truly, especially when he’s in the middle of an active album promotion where each minute of sleep is absolutely fucking precious.

But it’s not Jongin’s fault when SM put him in a group with _Taemin,_ his best friend since like forever ago, the kid who Jongin had matching mushroom haircuts together with in the name of friendship—the best friend he’d always beg his mom to sleep over at when they were thirteen.

Now that he’s twenty-six, though, the novelty never wears off. Even though he can technically just sleep over at Taemin’s whenever he wants to, it’s still exciting that he gets to do group promotions together with his best friend, sleeping in the same house for a prolonged period of time. It feels like those overnight trips in middle school he used to wait all semester for, the trips where he would play truth or dare with his dudebros and like, tell each other scary stories and stay up until sun rises. 

Except it’s every day now with SuperM schedules taking over his entire month’s calendar.

So he’s awake, lounging next to Taemin in his bed as they play PUBG for the third time that night, adrenaline still pumping through his veins in full force. Nights with Taemin can only be categorized into two themes: one where they get all emo and start talking about deep shit like how hard they had it back then as trainees and how far they’ve made it now, or one where they play games and talk about the stupidest conspiracy theories until one of them falls asleep first.

Tonight, it’s the latter. There’s a comfortable buzz under Jongin’s skin after the few shots of the peach soju Taemin had sneaked in an hour ago, and there’s an itch of wanting to go and do _something_ inside of him that he can’t seem to satiate by just playing PUBG, so after the third time Taemin nags at him for bouncing his knees and ruining his concentration, Jongin sits up abruptly.

“Let’s go swimming,” Jongin proposes as he jumps on his toes restlessly, hands already reaching to take his shirt off. Before he can take his shirt off, though, Taemin drags him back to bed by the bottom of his shirt.

“We have to wake up at 6am tomorrow, idiot,” Taemin says, not even looking up from his phone as he leans back into his pillow. 

“ _God,_ ” Jongin groans, kicking his feet in frustration which earns a kick on his shin from Taemin that he skillfully dodges, “I feel so fucking strung up, like there’s all this pent up energy and no fucking outlet? I don’t know what you mixed in with that soju, but that shit’s the real deal.”

Taemin scoffs, “I didn’t mix shit into it. You haven’t gotten laid in a while, that’s why, just go jack off in your room.”

“What—I—” Taemin is so fucking rude and annoying, but the worst part is that he’s actually kind of right. “Fuck you.”

Taemin shrugs and goes back to playing his game.

Jongin looks down at his own crotch, and then his hands, and thinks that it’s too much work. “I can’t even think about doing it, with the kids just sleeping soundly in the other room? Gross.”

This time, finally, Taemin looks up from his phone. “There’s no kids out here, Jongin, and we’re all like, dudes.”

“But—”

“Mark’s like, twenty-one. That’s decades away from when you first lost your virginity, remember? When you called me that time when we were… seventeen? At like 9pm going all like, _Oh my god, Taemin, I just had sex with Jin—_ ” Jongin covers Taemin’s mouth with his hands. He has intense war flashbacks.

“You’re so fucking annoying, I swear to god,” Jongin says when he pulls his hand away from Taemin’s face after the third lick. It’s funny that Taemin thinks that it would work on Jongin. They have shared far worse things than just saliva.

Taemin is laughing now, his giggles quickly turning into full blown laughter as he zones out, and Jongin knows that Taemin is zoning out because he’s thinking back about how stupid Jongin’s first time had been.

“But seriously,” Taemin says after he calms down, face an annoying shade of pink now, “You worshipped the ground Jinju walked on. To be fair, she’s pretty hot, but there’s really not a lot of things you guys had in common. I mean, she was a main vocal trainee and that’s about the only thing you guys had in common? Both SM trainees, and that’s it.”

“That’s not true,” Jongin frowns, trying to recall pretty Jinju noona with her slanted eyes and dimpled smiles, “she liked dogs.”

The look that Taemin sends him makes Jongin want to punch him. So he does, on his bicep, anyway, because faces are _always_ off-limits no matter how bitchy anyone gets when it comes to fighting with your labelmates. He remembers one time, Baekhyun had bit Sehun’s ass so hard it (and _yes,_ he did it out of anger) bruised for a couple of weeks and they got a good laugh out of it once they made up dramatically after twenty-seven hours of uncomfortable angry silence.

“Now that I think about it, though, she’s probably your only ex that’s very different from the others?” Taemin starts suddenly, his eyes glazing over suddenly like he always does when he gets oddly inspired. It’s the kind of glazed look Taemin gets that could either produce an album filled with musical masterpieces or produce a horrible kitchen dish like that honey-flavored ramen. 

“You’re not gonna write an entire album out of all my exes, right,” Jongin asks, a little scared now.

“No, why the fuck would I do that,” Taemin looks at Jongin like _he’s_ the one that’s crazy when it’s Taemin that looks like he’s having the epiphany of his life. Taemin jumps off the bed and pulls a sketching pad out of his suitcase because it’s Taemin and he has weird shit buried in his suitcase.

“Come here,” he beckons Jongin as he sits on the wooden floor, folding his legs with a newfound determination. “I just had a brilliant idea of identifying what your ultimate ideal type is from your past exes so you can finally get laid again.”

“What? Why the fuck would you do that? Why don’t you go and identify your _own_ ideal type,” Jongin glares at him, already hating the idea of being perceived romance-wise by his best friend. 

“I already know my type, it’s anything with a heartbeat that likes me back,” Taemin says distractedly, like Jongin’s input doesn’t matter at all despite this being about something that’s disturbingly personal to Jongin, “now stop being a baby and come here. You said you wanted something to do, right? This is something we can do.”

For a while, Jongin contemplates on giving Taemin the finger and just fucking off back to his own room, but then complies like the pushover he is and sits cross legged right next to Taemin that’s already uncapping a marker pen that came out of absolutely no where.

“Okay, so how far back are we going,” Taemin says as he starts to draw a large circle.

Jongin thinks. “Um, we can start with middle school, I guess.”

“No, that’s too long, those relationships lasted for like three weeks tops. Let’s just start with Jinju and identify from there,” Taemin decides. 

_Then why did you fucking ask,_ Jongin wants to say, but he’s an adult and he’s the bigger person between Taemin and him. Literally and figuratively.

“Describe to me the main characteristics of Jinju noona to me, in at least three adjectives,” Taemin scrawls her name on top of the drawn circle, underlining it before making three bullet points right under her name.

“Well, she’s… nice? She always buys boba for Sehun and me after practice. She has the cutest smiles and she giggles a lot,” Jongin pictures Lee Jinju for the first time in a decade, her short, brown hair and thick winged eyeliner. He remembers how nice she’d been, how she smiles all the time despite her intimidating eyeliner, the four piercings she had on her left ear.

Jongin feels a little nostalgic now, something blooming in his chest as he remembers being really upset when Jinju told him that she’s tired of training, that it’s been too long, and she has to focus on getting into college instead of hoping for a hopeless dream. They’d broken up four months after they first dated, and Jongin has never heard of her ever again since then. He suddenly wonders what she’s up to, now, and makes a mental note to stalk her name on Facebook when he has the chance later.

“Nice, cute smile, likes dogs,” Taemin mutters as he writes it down, “that’s pretty basic, but we can go back to that later. Next, please.”

Jongin rolls his eyes, but clears his throat before he says, “Um, next we have Minyoung.”

His relationship with Park Minyoung had been somewhat sad, too. Jongin knew he’d been way over his head when he chose to date his high school friend when he wanted to debut as an idol, but Minyoung had waited for him after his late-night practices and went to all of his showcases with a bouquet of flower waiting for him after every performance despite already working two part-time jobs after school.

“Minyoung was really flirty, in the nicest way,” Jongin recalls, the way she had made every guy in their class swoon at her feet, “she laughs really easily at everything I say but she’s the most loyal out of all my exes, I think. A little clumsy, too. She falls a lot—I remember buying Pororo band-aids for her all the time.”

They’d broken up after high school because Jongin had to debut. They tried to make it work but it was just impossible, with all the schedule Jongin had and the fact that he practically had no privacy as soon as he started living with five other men—Minyoung couldn’t put her life on hold for Jongin forever. He remembers crying in Junmyeon hyung’s arms and locking himself dramatically in his room for days like a fool because he couldn’t even get out of the dorm to get drunk and be properly sad about it. Last time Jongin heard, she’s married with a little boy now.

“So essentially—a loyal, adorable, flirty person,” Taemin says writing it down with an interesting look on his face. “She’s really one of your best exes, though, I remember her coming over after that dance practice in tears with a heating pad after I told her about your hip injury.”

“Yeah,” Jongin sighs. 

“It’s funny that she turned out to be gay, though,” Taemin adds. 

Jongin blinks at him. “Wait, what the fuck do you mean?”

Taemin blinks back at him innocently. “Yeah, she married Park Jimin—both of us got the invitation, remember? Park Jimin is her college girlfriend.”

Jongin blinks again, brain slowing down and speeding up at the same time. “Wait, so,” he says, recalling all the times that she’d been very friendly with other girls before they’d dated. That wasn’t being friendly. She was flirty to girls, _too_. “No, she’s not gay. She definitely likes dudes, too.” There was no doubting the sincerity in her eyes the first time she’d told Jongin that she loved him when they turned twenty. “So she’s bi?”

“Let’s add that, then,” Taemin replies, adding a “• bi” on the list under her name. “Okay, next. Before you get all nostalgic and shit.”

“Soojung spoke fluent English,” it’s really one of the first traits of Soojung that Jongin can recall. She was really hot when she got all frustrated at Jongin and started muttering in English to herself. “And she was the softest, despite all the shit people say about her being a bitch. She really didn’t deserve that. A little hot headed, true, but soft.”

Soojung was the first celebrity he’d been in a public relationship with, even though they’ve technically known each other since they were children, before they were celebrities. Soojung had always sort of been… an enigma to Jongin. They never truly clicked until Jongin understood, too, how hard idol life takes a toll on people.

If his relationship with Minyoung had been sad, his relationship with Soojung had been straight up tragic. They barely had the chance to enjoy their honeymoon stage before they were put under the public spotlight, every single interaction they had scrutinized and dissected open like a poor frog on a high school kid’s Science lab table. They didn’t deserve that, really. Soojung was so nice, but it had been too difficult, and soon there were more tears than smiles shared in their relationship until they finally had to call it quits.

“English speaking, hot-headed, soft,” Taemin summarizes. Jongin laughs a little when it’s put together like that. “Okay, and, last one.”

Jongin takes a deep breath. The freshest one hurts the most, yet it’s been more than a year. “English speaking, too, if you want to write that down.”

This time, it’s Taemin that laughs, and writes it down on Jennie’s circle. All the four circles are adjoined now.

“Jennie was really fun, and exciting,” Jongin describes, remembering all the hobbies they shared together and all the late-night calls they had, “an explosion of personality. We had so many things in common. Maybe too much that it wound up being disastrous.”

And that’s it. At least they had the chance to enjoy themselves before the public scrutinized the hell out of their relationship, and they just… didn’t work out anymore. It didn’t help that they worked in different companies that hugely supported their break up. Jongin has made his peace with how painful things had turned out, but it still sucks to remember how the general public had rejoiced over their break up.

Break ups _suck._ Jongin doesn’t think he wants to go through the pain of any of that ever again. 

“Okay, we’re done!” Taemin announces with a clap, and lifts the sketch pad up to reveal a venn diagram of all Jongin’s exes with all their defining traits listed in Taemin’s bad handwriting. A perfect empty space right in the middle where all the circles had joined glares back at them.

“Wow, pre-debut you and post-debut you have really different tastes,” Taemin whistles, before putting the sketch pad down again, scanning his masterpiece with interested eyes. “So the common thread I see is: adorable-slash-cute, English-speaking, disaster.”

He writes it down quickly, not even giving Jongin a chance to give his own input about his _own_ types. As Jongin reads it, though, Taemin’s not wrong. Adorable-slash-cute, English-speaking, and somewhat a disaster _are_ the common threads.

A brief wave of silence washes over them before Taemin says, “Yo, what the fuck, Mark fits all of these categories.”

Jongin’s first instinct is to punch Taemin’s arm again.

“Mark’s not a disaster,” Jongin says defensively, somewhat surprised that he’s even being defensive right now over everything else, “and I don’t like guys. No offense.”

“Sure you don’t, that’s why you got all sulky when Sehun started dating someone after you guys debuted and acted all weird for a couple of months before you reconnected with Soojung,” Taemin says a-matter-of-factly, like he knows Jongin better than Jongin knows himself, “whatever that was, it was at _least_ a romantic crush. I don’t blame you, though. Sehun’s really handsome and cute.”

Jongin glances at the clock on his phone’s lock screen, and it shows that it’s a little after one a.m now. He wants to blame the time for making his brain even think of acknowledging Taemin’s crazy theory, but he’s instantly reminded of how terrible it had felt when Sehun told him that he’s seeing someone back in 2013. He’d chucked it off as him feeling left behind as Sehun’s self-proclaimed EXO best friend, until he realizes now that Sehun was never really his best friend. Wonsik and Taemin were always his best friends.

“And Mark _is_ a disaster. He stumbles upon his own words when he gets really hyped and goes on these panicky moments whenever someone hot does something that overwhelms him,” Taemin continues, persuasive, like presenting a school essay instead of talking about his own best friend's love life.

“But…” Jongin trails, his brain suddenly compiling a supercut of all the things he’d done with Mark—how Mark laughs really easily at everything he says, speaks English when he gets frustrated in trying to express himself to Jongin in Korean, blushing profusely when Jongin does something nice to him. His heart skips a beat thinking about it. “How do you know that.”

“I know that because he gets all flustered around you, and you’re universally accepted as a hot guy,” Taemin replies. The way he’s looking at Jongin makes Jongin think that he can answer all the upcoming questions Jongin might have for him. A little challenging, somewhat. “Also, he’s bi. That’s a common thing he has with Minyoung.”

Jongin doesn’t know what to say. How Taemin even knows that, he doesn’t want to ask.

“No he doesn’t,” Jongin finally says weakly. He feels light-headed now, thoughts now drifting off to Mark and everything he does, the way he hugs Jongin, the way he buries his head in Jongin’s neck when he’s overwhelmed by how _funny_ he thinks Jongin is being, the way his hands curl around Jongin’s sweater sleeve when they’re walking next to each other.

Mark’s pretty laughter, pretty face, pretty english, Mark’s… _everything._ That’s why he’d felt an odd twist in his stomach every time Mark slides his hands across his chest like it’s nothing, always casually yet carefully touching Jongin everywhere.

Jongin had thought that it had been discomfort, at first, but then he realized he’s not at all annoyed by Mark’s touches. In fact, he finds himself _leaning_ into them. He always chucked off the weird lurch in his chest every time Mark’s skin brushed with his as a brotherly endearment. Taemin’s not wrong—Mark _is_ cute. It’s… normal to find him endearing.

_Right?_

“I’m going to bed,” he announces before Taemin can continue being annoying, and promptly jogs out of Taemin’s room.

He falls asleep just before the sun rises.

*

The next morning, it’s Mark that shakes him awake.

“Hyung, wake up,” he says in English.

When Jongin opens his eyes, Mark’s pretty face greets him with a shy smile. Jongin is hyper-aware of how close Mark’s face is to his, his hands clutching onto his sleep shirt adorably like he’s afraid that touching Jongin’s skin would be rude or something.

Fuck. _Fuck._

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> You can always scream to me on [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/wangyobi) about Mark's heart eyes at Jongin 24/7.


End file.
